Grave Sight Page 0,41

what they perceived as modern ills: abortion, homosexuality, television, divorce. They saw the past in terms of Friday evening fiddling with the neighbors on the front porch, shoofly pie, gospel singing, long happy marriages.

I saw sudden, needless death.

Soon enough we were in the new part of the funeral home, and the director was showing us Helen. Hollis had asked him to do it, after assuring Gleason I wouldn't faint or throw up at the sight of the body. I like funeral homes. I like the attempt to make death presentable and palatable. It's a cushion to life. It's like the pretty padded lining to the coffin. The dead sure don't care, but makes the living feel better.

The buzzing in my head steadily increased as we grew closer to the room with the closed door. It reached a high drone when I stepped into the bright white sterility of the modern embalming room.

"I haven't started on her yet," Elijah Gleason said. "I just got her back from the state crime lab. It'll take them months to finish the toxicology, they told me, they're hundreds of cases behind."

"Would you stay outside?" Tolliver asked. "It's just that my sister has a pretty startling reaction sometimes, and it might alarm you."

"Sorry," Gleason said firmly. "Helen's body's under my care, and I'm staying with her."

Well, I hadn't expected much different. I nodded, all my attention focused on the form on the tilted table. I held up a hand to ask the two men not to speak.

I approached Helen. From her neck down, she was covered by a sheet. Her hair had been brushed. The hum of her presence filled my head. Her soul was still there. That was very unexpected. I jerked with surprise. For the soul to linger three days after death, especially when the body had been found, was almost unprecedented. I knew I would get more information since she was still intact. But I felt full of pity. My neck muscles began to jerk, almost imperceptibly, because I wasn't trying to search for her, she was right in front of me. And she was intact.

The funeral home director was eyeing me with ill-concealed disgust. "She's there," I said very softly, and I saw Gleason's face go slack with horror. I glanced at Tolliver, and he nodded, understanding. "I'm just going to touch her," I explained to Gleason. "With respect."

I stared down at Helen's battered face, my neck and facial muscles relaxing finally. All the bruising made her look as if someone had painted her in shades of dark. Under the edge of the sheet, my fingertips made contact with the skin of her shoulder.

From a distance, I could hear myself gasp - a deep, throaty, alarmed sound. I could see the arm upraised, the arm that held a candlestick. I was crouching down, trying to avoid the blow. The arm was a man's, in a long sleeve. An overwhelming sense of betrayal and shock. The glimpse of the descending arm. Pain and disillusionment, bitterness, the hope of resurrection, a terrifying blend of final emotions. And then nothing, nothing, nothing.

"I know," I whispered. "You can go, now."

And the soul of Helen Hopkins left her body.

This had only happened to me once before. I hadn't known what to do then, had only stumbled on the presence of the dead person by accident. This is what leads to the stories of haunting. The soul wants some acknowledgment of its struggle; the agony involved in the death of the body, and the emotional turmoil of being killed, somehow adhere the soul to the body. If not addressed before burial, this adhesion leads to hauntings.

I'd laid Helen Hopkins to rest before she was even buried. I had done something good.

But I'd endured her final moment with her, and the aftermath settled in. I was very shaky, and I felt Tolliver take my arm and lead me to a metal chair. What was in front of me finally registered in my brain, and I realized that Elijah Gleason was staring at me, mouth agape, eyes narrowed. I knew that look. It was a witch-burning look.

"Helen is at rest with our Lord," I said immediately, and I managed to smile. They like that.

Gleason looked a smidge less horrified. "You can tell?" he asked, at last.

"Yes," I said, my voice firm. "She is in heaven with all the saints, in eternal glory."

This toeing of the line always impressed them and got them off my back. It was a card I